It’s not the only thing I’m reading in 2016 (see above about Lily King’s Euphoria) but I decided that after a lifetime of hearing about Proust and having never read a word of Remembrance of Things Past, I would at least give it a try. A friend told me I wouldn’t make it past the first hundred and fifty pages, but I’m near the end of Swann’s Way (25 pages or so from the end, in fact), lucky enough to have been introduced to it through the Lydia Davis translation. It’s funny and lively, and some of the sentences are frankly breathtaking. The ability to turn the ordinary into the minutely observed intrigues me; I think of Nicholson Baker and John Updike and Alice Munro and J. M. Coetzee and dozens of other writers I’m not thinking of–all very different, but all have the ability to tease apart psychological nuance. Volume 2 awaits.
